The other day I posted on Miniweaving group this meme with a photo of a couple walking down the beach holding hands, but one person was replaced with a gigantic skein of yarn. The meme read: “Never forget who was there for you at your lowest.” It was cute and very funny, and very, very true.
It reminded me of a period of prolonged depression some 25 years ago, after my divorce, when I could not do anything. My mind couldn’t focus on reading, I could not even watch a movie and follow the plot, so my work suffered, and I lost my job too.
It is at that time that I went back to making beautiful things: I embroidered, and I also made puppets, and performed puppet shows in local schools and festivals. I went back to the place of healing – art. While the word “art” is usually used for fine arts, I extend it here to mean anything that is not meant for pure survival. For example, baking bread is needed for food, but baking bread that has unusual shapes or decorations – unnecessary for the actual nutrition or taste – I call that art. In that respect, we are all artists whenever we surpass the utility and necessity of our creations. And as I am musing over what art is, I have an ever-bigger question: why do we need to do it? Why not just be happy with the plain utility of the work we do? Why did the cavepeople put those drawings on the walls of their rock dwellings depicting a hunt that was over? There is a whole array of possible answers offered by science, philosophy, and art itself. I have no ambition to find it myself. I think just wondering over it is stimulating enough.
Art is omnipresent. Growing up in rural Balkan, I watched women in my surroundings - my mom, aunts, grandmothers, their neighbours - exchange patterns for sewing, embroidery, weaving, crochet, and knitting, and always having something in their hands when finally sitting down after a long day. Part of it was a very traditional attitude that one should never sit idle, but I think they would’ve chosen it anyway. For them, this quiet, repetitive, tedious activity was the time when they could finally do something that was theirs only, and where they could make decisions and call shots doing whatever they felt was the best. They could explore their own aesthetic senses, each woman adding or modifying the pattern that was prevalent in her village and making it her own.
My generation felt all this to be too domestic and abandoned most of these crafts. Very few of my friends wanted to learn how to knit or crochet, that was so passe. It was the seventies, and being cool did not include granny squares. I regret to say I too felt this to be old-fashioned and pursued different arts – mostly music and literature. But I didn’t even reach my 30s when I got into traditional crafts all anew, and with a vengeance, never stopping. Sewing and embroidery were my passions for a number of years. And they held me together throughout many trials and tribulations that life brought. When there was anxiety, the best thing to keep it in check was to do something quiet, repetitive and tedious; when I was utterly depressed, the only joy was to watch my work progress, materializing into something both visual and tactile. I found my place of reflection and peace and kept on expanding its reach.
The questions of why we do art may never be fully answered but for the time being, I choose these two reasons. First, we do art to be ourselves. Just as my grandmother had to conform to the demands of farming life, doing what was necessary, so do I have to oblige the demands of my corporate job which pays the bills. As much as I like my job and the work environment, I still don’t call the shots, and more often than not I have to abandon my ideas and preferences to meet more pressing corporate objectives; otherwise, my charts would all look like they are wearing pajamas, and my trimester reports would be done as animated animal cartoons. But when I turn to my weaving, I make all decisions, determine my own goals and objectives, decide how to pursue them, experiment relentlessly, start and abandon projects without having to write a report on any of them, and feel completely free. The quiet, repetitive, and tedious process of weaving is intertwined (intertwined – you see what I did there?) with the exhilarating discoveries of new methods, new patterns, new possibilities, where I can be myself.
And then, we do art to be WITH ourselves. When I weave, the world slowly quiets down and disappears. All the worries, irritations, plans, and uncertainties fade beyond this soothing bubble of peace I create while focused on my art. I get away from the world so I can hear the silence of myself.
Why do you do your art?
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